So the theme for this week is letting go.
And I use that term as an umbrella term for the movement or the relaxation of the body,
The releasing of tension.
And really ultimately to the full cessation,
The full release of our suffering,
Our clinging,
What's kind of said to be the end of the Buddhist path.
So there's this large view of everything in between releasing the body to full liberation.
There's a whole life that lives in there,
Right?
And in one way,
This whole path is to bring something to an end and that's our suffering,
The ways in which we suffer because we hold on and we cling and we resist.
There's some kind of inner compulsive behavior,
Driven behavior that has us holding and clinging and we see it and it might have a whole lot of authority.
There might be some good reasons,
But we also see with practice that our holding limits us.
It diminishes us and it constricts us and it doesn't really allow us for,
It doesn't allow for that full flowering of the heart,
Of our minds and our life.
So part of mindfulness practice is not just being present for things and seeing and being mindful and being maybe a little bit calmer and less reactive in our life,
But it really is,
It means to have the deepest and fullest experience of letting go.
And so our path is to learn something about all the different forms of letting go that a person can have.
And letting go really is a pretty ordinary activity.
There's a tremendous amount of letting go that people do throughout the day.
And we probably,
It doesn't take much reflection to realize how much you're letting go of.
Sometimes it's really automatic and pretty easy and you don't even think about it as letting go.
Like maybe you were expecting to have fruit for breakfast and you open up the fridge and it's not there,
It's finished.
So that's okay.
What I wanted wasn't there and so I'll have cereal instead,
Right?
And in that moment there's a kind of letting go,
A letting be,
The desire is let go of.
Or maybe you're expecting to go out on a walk with some friends and you wake up and nowadays,
Or throughout the summer at least,
The air isn't really that clean because there's smoke from fires around us.
And maybe you realize you can't go on a hike because of the bad air.
So then letting go is a little bit harder.
It's not that easy because you've had this anticipation of having some time with a friend and then there's this ongoing limitation to life because of air quality,
Because of COVID and all the things that are hard to let go of.
So the desire remains but then the desire then turns into,
Now it's frustration that things are the way that they are.
Or maybe there's some anger that things are the way they are,
Some weariness,
Kind of like not again,
One more thing.
So the desire wasn't just simply letting go of the breakfast in the morning with the fruit.
Now it's more,
It's deeper because the context changed.
And so even finding freedom with that is part of the path.
And you can feel physiologically sometimes the difference between holding on and wanting and letting go and settling back.
I had last week we did this exercise where we held on to our fist quite tightly and squeezed the fist and just stayed with this tight fist.
Keep holding that fist,
Feeling that sensation and then when you open your hand and settling back with an open hand,
It's very different.
It's a good exercise to try for yourself.
And even maybe in the car,
You know,
If you're driving someplace,
It might be that we can let go at the red light and stop and sit there and kind of rest.
But as we're waiting for the light to change,
You know,
Anticipating that it's going to turn green,
We can actually experience the physiological tension that builds up.
You know,
Our foot's kind of poised on the gas pedal.
We're ready to go as soon as it turns green because we have to get somewhere.
And so it's a picking up again.
So what it looks like so much letting be and letting go in our life and our daily life,
It's like picking up and letting go.
Picking up and letting go.
It's part of our everyday life.
So in mindfulness practice,
One of the things to be mindful of is being mindful of letting go.
So how to become mindful of letting go.
This is our practice and it can be as simple as becoming aware of all the simple and ordinary ways we let go throughout the day.
Some of the ways that I've described like being in the car,
Letting go of certain things in the refrigerator and the desire for certain breakfast or seeing friends to really become aware of all the ordinary ways we let go throughout the day.
It builds momentum.
It builds familiarity.
And just like we want to become familiar with the workings of our thinking and our emotions and the body and get familiar with our attachments like we did in the last couple of weeks,
We also want to become aware of the workings of letting go and how it works in our own life and how we do it.
Where we're really good at it and where we're not.
Where it's hard and how it manifests in the body.
Sometimes the shoulders go up.
Sometimes we tighten our jaw.
Maybe not clenching the jaw but clenching in our mind.
For a moment just in this two minutes ago,
My son let out a cry and I could feel the tension,
The wanting to go and find out what was going on.
The gripping.
And I took a breath and I felt into that like,
Oh okay,
There's a gripping here.
Wanting to know what that's about.
So we grip our ideas and we grip our thoughts.
So to start being mindful of letting go and how we do this in ordinary life is a support for doing it when it's harder,
When something more challenging arises.
It's like that poem from Mary Oliver.
To live in this world,
We can hold that which we love but when the time comes to let it go,
We let it go.
So we're building up this muscle of familiarity and understanding around letting go.
And letting,
This idea of letting is a powerful way of meeting the world,
Respecting the way things are.
Letting is not holding on or clinging,
Not wanting or pushing.
It's like,
Oh,
That's how it is.
I'm letting.
Okay,
Let me just watch this now.
Let me be.
And watch something in your mind's eye,
Like watching it has a very powerful effect.
It's kind of like the sun shining on a young plant in the garden.
The sun allows it to grow.
So this watching and mindfulness,
Letting it be and watching it is like the sun shining the sun on something.
So in things that are unwise to do,
There tends to be a movement towards not being so invested in it when we're watching it.
And things that are wise to do tend to grow in the sun of awareness.
So this capacity to let something be.
It's like when we just sit still in our meditation,
Having this ability to be present and to see the flow of experience,
Kindly and lovingly just seeing,
Seeing,
I see what this is in this moment.
Oh,
This is just a thought in this moment.
It's just someone being angry at me or in this moment.
It's just fear in this moment.
It's just.
I find that word is also such a powerful word,
Just.
It doesn't have such a heavy burden,
Like a heavy burden with it.
It's just like fill in the blank.
There's something very powerful that begins to happen when we just let things be.
We start to see that we're no longer the agent of change.
But we,
When we let things be,
It allows for change to happen.
So allow letting be.
And the deepest,
Fullest kind of letting go that we do in Buddhist practice is not something that we can actually do.
It's just something that happens on its own when we're really learning and maturing into this process of letting be.
So the invitation these next few days before we meet again is to,
To tune into all of the little ways that you already let go.
To tune in and start paying attention to those ways.
So thank you for your kind attention.
We have a few minutes if you would like to share.
